Our Video Experiment

We began toying with video several years ago as part of our student newspaper operation. At that time, we were providing no video training in our curriculum, and the idea was to depend on students who were experienced in video to do the work. We already had a successful photo staff, and so we saw video as an extension of that, and we tried to model the video staff along the same lines.

A little explanation will help here: Our student newspaper, The Brown and White, is open to all students in the university. In fact, of the 100 or more staff members each semester, two-thirds are not journalism majors. Many have never taken a journalism class, and the only training they have had is an orientation and “boot camp” to the newspaper staff in the first semester that they participate.

Almost all of our photographers are non-majors, and Lehigh offers very little in the way of photography classes. Nevertheless, we have managed to maintain a good staff over the years, thanks to a stream of students who had an independent interest in photography.

So I was surprised to find that applying this model to video didn’t work.

The students who were interested in video came from a background in high school that was rooted in television-style news and documentary production. They showed up expecting to do that for the web version of our newspaper, and were disappointed that we don’t have a studio and a lot of expensive equipment.

The help we sought within the university from professional staff members who provide video support in various ways was also rooted in the television and film models. These people do not get what video is on the Internet. They’re either trying to use the Internet to do broadband television, or as a venue for movie-style documentaries. They wanted to train our students to use complicated camera equipment, do proper studio lighting, and to edit video in Final Cut Pro. In their model, it would take days to get video on the web.

It seemed to me that we needed a fundamentally different approach to video for the website. A good example of that style happened near here, in Allentown, just the day before yesterday. A natural gas line exploded at about 10:30 p.m., demolishing two houses, killing five people and causing a fire that ultimately destroyed a city block. Within an hour or so of the explosion, our local Tribune-owned newspaper, The Morning Call, had several videos posted from the scene. No standup reporter, no narration, just raw footage showing firemen, police and chaos. Links to the video and story were posted on Twitter. As the story developed the next day, the videos became more sophisticated, but they were still Internet videos, meant to supplement the story in the multimedia world of the web.

So we face a couple of problems in our small journalism program. First, we don’t want to invest a lot of money in expensive equipment and facilities. Second, we need to train all of our students how to tell a visual story using video on the web, not just some subset of our students. In our context, we want to emphasize the storytelling aspect, not the technical aspect. Problem is, the technical side of things can get in the way, because sophisticated cameras and complex editing software have a steep learning curve, and create a significant hurdle that needs to be cleared before getting to the important side: telling the story.

When our newest colleague, Jeremy Littau, joined our department in 2009, the two of us began to strategize about the best way to incorporate video storytelling into our curriculum. Jeremy’s interests are squarely on multimedia and community-building. He introduced an experimental class so that we could try out some teaching ideas and see how they could fit into our curriculum. Jeremy and I put a lot of thought into this problem of how best to teach the video skills, and ultimately tried what might sound like a radical approach. We opted for the simplest possible system.

Lehigh students use both Windows-based computers and Macs, but Lehigh is mostly a Windows environment. We wanted to teach a video system that all of our students could learn and use easily, without a lot of training and at a low cost. All of the Windows operating systems, starting with XP, come with Windows Movie Maker. We tested it and decided that, while it’s not a professional-quality editing program, it offers all the features we need to teach basic storytelling. And it’s free.

We looked at a number of cameras and ultimately bought 20 Kodak Zi8s. These are simple, one-button cameras that capture surprisingly good HD video and audio. They look like cell phones. Anyone can learn to use one in a few minutes. In one three-hour lab period, we can have students taking video, editing it in Movie Maker, and uploading it to YouTube. In another lab, they can learn to do titling and transitions. In a series of assignments, they can learn to shoot A and B rolls and mix them together with narration. Easy, fun, inexpensive – and in the end they’re learning what we want them to learn, which is how to tell a story visually with video.

We’ll build on this foundation later in an optional course that uses more sophisticated equipment, software and techniques, but that will be just for a smaller group of students who want to take it to the next level. Meanwhile, this more basic model is the one that I will incorporate into my Visual Communication class in the fall. Every student will be issued a Zi8, and that camera will be used for both still photography and video. We’ll use Windows Movie Maker as a learning tool, then, if they want, students will be free to use other video editing programs after they’ve mastered storytelling techniques.

I’m wondering if any of you out there have done similar experimentation with basic video training, and whether you have anything to share from that experience that would be useful to me next fall.

Next blog: It’s Still Photography